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With this reassurance fresh in his mind, Dante glanced up to find Elise poking her blond head out the infirmary room door. "It's time," she said, soft light shining in her pale purple eyes.
"The baby's almost here now, Dante."
He scrambled inside, his heart leaping into his throat. He moved in close beside his Breedmate, taking her hand to his lips and pressing an adoring kiss into her damp palm. "Tess,"
he whispered, his tongue thick, joy and worry crawling up the back of his throat. "How're you doing, angel?"
She started to answer, but then her face scrunched tight and her grasp on his hand became a vise. Savannah told her calmly to bear down, that they were almost there. Tess pulled herself up off the infirmary bed. A shredding howl tore out of her mouth, and Dante felt his legs go a bit wobbly beneath him. He held it together, though. Bad enough he'd spent the last hour propping up the corridor walls, he wasn't about to let Tess go another second without him at her side. The pain dragged out for an excruciatingly long couple of minutes before Savannah instructed Tess to lie back again and relax. She was panting as she looked up at Dante, sweat beading her forehead. He mopped it away with the cloth Gabrielle handed him, then pressed a tender kiss to his beautiful mate's brow.
"Do you have any idea how much I love you?" he murmured, holding her aqua gaze.
"You're amazing, Tess. You're gorgeous, so incredibly brave. You're going to be a great mother to our - "
Her lips peeled back from her teeth as a fresh bellow exploded from her throat and drowned him out. Dante felt the rush of hot pain as it roared through Tess's delicate body. It was beyond intense, a shredding anguish that made him want to swear off ever so much as thinking about another baby if it meant putting Tess through this kind of ordeal.
"Okay, folks," Savannah said, her voice as soothing as a balm. "Here we go now. One more push, Tess. He's almost here."
Dante bent his head down beside her face and whispered private words of encouragement, things meant only for Tess. Praise for what she was giving him tonight, and pledges of devotion for her that he couldn't adequately express in feeble words.
He held her hand as the final contraction twisted through her. He shouted with joy as his son finally appeared, a tiny, pink, squirming little bundle held aloft and squalling in Savannah's expert hands. And he wept without shame as he met Tess's beautiful, elated gaze in that next moment, loving her with every particle of his being.
He leaned over and kissed his amazing Breedmate, pulling her into his embrace and sharing the euphoria of this precious moment of their lives together, particularly knowing how it had come in the midst of so much upheaval and strife.
After a few minutes, Savannah came over with the impossibly small bundle that was their newborn son. "I know you must be eager to hold him," she said, placing the baby in Tess's waiting arms. "He's beautiful, you guys. Perfect in every way."
Tess started weeping again, tenderly touching the infant's tiny cheeks and the rosebud mouth. Dante marveled at the sight of his child. He marveled at the woman who gave him such a miracle, something equally as precious to him as the incredible gift of her love. He stroked a tendril of damp blond hair away from her face. "Thank you," he told her softly. "Thank you for making my life so complete."
"I love you," she replied, bringing his hand to her lips and kissing the heart of his broad palm. "Would you like to say hello to your son?"
"Our son," he said.
Tess nodded, so proud and lovely as he took the little bundle into his arms. His hands dwarfed the tiny infant. He felt clumsy with him, awkward as he tried to find a comfortable cradle for the newborn in his too-big arms. Finally, he learned the way to hold him, taking the utmost care to get everything right. Tess smiled up at him, her joy pouring through his veins along with his own happiness.
God, his heart was so full, it felt near to exploding.
Dante stared down into the pink, squalling face of their child. "Welcome to the world, Xander Raphael."
Corinne stood next to the bed that next morning, watching Hunter sleep. He lay naked on his stomach, an immense, masculine sprawl of beautiful, glyph-covered skin and bulky muscle. He snored lightly, resting as deeply as the dead.
Their night together had been incredible, and she had never felt more content than she had resting in his arms after they'd made love. But the night had been over for a while, and except for the few hours she'd been able to close her eyes and sleep, her thoughts had centered on one thing: the urgency to find her son.
It was that need that had made her rise before daybreak, slip out from Hunter's comforting warmth, and head out back to the swamp to look for the truck he'd left there on his return from Henry Vachon's. She had gotten lucky, and found the white box truck unlocked behind Amelie's house on the river. Corinne had crawled inside and spent the better part of an hour poring through the reams of paper files and photographs she'd found stuffed inside the broken safe.
Dragos's laboratory files. Decades' worth of records.
She'd thumbed through every one, searching for anything that might bring her closer to learning the fate of her son or the other infants born inside the lab. She'd found medical charts and experiment results - thousands of pages of codes and jargon that meant nothing to her. To make matters worse, none of the files contained the names of their subjects. Like some kind of callous inventory of assets, Dragos's records contained only case numbers, control groups, and cold statistics.
Everyone he'd touched - every life he'd ruined inside the hellish madness of his laboratory - meant nothing to him.
Less than nothing.
Corinne had dug through the remaining stacks of papers in a fit of impotent outrage. She'd wanted to tear all the offending records into tiny pieces. And then, nearly to the bottom of the safe's contents, her fingers brushed across the smooth leather of a large file pouch. She'd pulled it out and dumped the files into her lap, sifting through them for even the smallest shred of hope.
The hand-recorded entries were more of the same impersonal inventories that were in the other files. Except there was something different about these dates and notations. Something that had made the fine hairs at the back of Corinne's neck prickle with suspicion ... with a certain, dreadful knowing.
She held the leather file pouch in her hands now, as she moved closer to the bed where Hunter was just starting to rouse. He must have sensed her in the shuttered quiet of the room. His head came up off the pillow, eyelids blinking open over the piercing gold of his gaze. He saw that she was dressed, that she was still breathing hard from her run back to Amelie's house, and he frowned. "What's wrong? Have you been somewhere?"
She couldn't keep the truth from him any longer. Not after what they'd shared last night. She owed him that much. She owed him her trust.
